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"Is it just about having minimal boilerplate" That's a lot of it, but I think people don't realize how every keystroke counts with shell. There's only a handf
by jerf 2y ago
"Is it just about having minimal boilerplate"
That's a lot of it, but I think people don't realize how every keystroke counts with shell.
There's only a handful of languages where the "apply function" operator is space. Shell is one of them. (Haskell & Forth are the other two I know off the top of my head, possibly Factor (concatenative in general tends this way).) Most new shells that are successful copy this. I don't think that's a coincidence. Lisp's abundance of parens is something that people will have trouble with, even Lisp programmers, because this is not the usual whining about a foreign language paradigm and not being used to reading parens... this is literally about the effort required to physically enter them with a keyboard.
- tom_ 2y agoRegarding minimal syntax: https://yosefk.com/blog/i-cant-believe-im-praising-tcl.html https://yosefk.com/blog/i-cant-believe-im-praising-tcl.html
- jerf 2y agoYeah, it really is like that. I've tried a couple of times to switch to things like IPython as my shell. And what nukes it every time is that while it may be better at the complicated commands I run maybe 1% of the time if you actually look at an unmodified history, cd("some dir") is just too much insanely harder than cd som TAB ENTER and I'm just smashing that TAB in a tight interactive loop to figure out how little I need to type. It doesn't look like it when you're doing it once, but when you're doing it dozens of times a minute it adds up fast.